Trekking from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Canada- wind at their back, ear to the ground, listening for -the logos of what trembles underfoot-- the poems in Music For Exile syncretize a host of lyrical, received and invented forms to beckon a -mythic assemblage,- an aggregation of personal and historical losses, intimate and en masse. From walking up Canefield River to hearing a thief on the stairs in Philadelphia, from dredging the voices of New England-s enslaved to confronting familial grief, these poems trouble the ache, that -ironic hunger for home- when home is itself a vortex of violence. In poems of place, poems of encounter, domestic epics and epistolary calls, deGannes allows both the narrative and associative to limn the caesurae in one immigrant woman-s arc. The poems trace and retrace, they crossover, they -draw poison out- they -fissure desire- and proclaim -no one can say gone is gone,- enacting and inviting an expansive reckoning of all that has brought us here. From t
